The Man Who Failed Gotham
by JTR01
Summary: Alan Scott reads about the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne.


**I don't own Batman or the JSA. I know this isn't great I just did this because I liked the idea of it.**

It's a horrible reality for Alan Scott to face. The reality that he failed the city he swore to protect. As he sat there in his bedroom looking at the newspaper in his hands, all he could think about was that he could have stopped what happened. He could have stopped the mugger who orphaned that boy in the photo, he could have saved Thomas and Martha Wayne.

He tried to assure himself that it wants his fault, that muggings like this happened all the time especially in that kind of neighborhoods. Of course that argument didn't really hold up when one thought about how back in Alan's day Park Row wasn't called Crime Alley, nor was it ruined by poverty and fear. It was a place for wealthy, a street where kids happily played together on the sidewalk and people had little worried. Even now when he's so old and tired he struggles to remember what he had eaten for breakfast every morning, Alan can name at least one occasion where he stopped a crime on every street in Gotham, except for Park Row because nothing ever happened.

But then he retired, like everyone else did. He didn't want to, and for a while many of his friends didn't want to. But one by one they gave in, either by giving up or being dragged into it by others, and Alan eventually found himself outnumbered. Everyone was telling him it was time to quit, that after a decade of fighting for the innocent it was time for them to live their lives. He saw that some actually believe that, and even those that didn't only hanged up their masks an scales because they were tired of the argument.

Thanks to McCarthy and men like him, by 1951 the once proud Justice Society had been reduced to its original members. For some months Alan had almost grown to like that fact, because at the end of the day these were his friends even if they argued. He'll, they were more than that. They were his family. Him, Wesley, Jay, Rex, Kent, Carter, Jim and Al founded the Society and Alan won't lie at times it felt like he early spoke to them due to how many members they worked with to right the good fight. With them gone it felt like the good old days when it was just the eight of them, except by that point they knew everything there was to know about each other and knew how to work together as a team.

But that feeling only lasted a few months. Eventually everyone decided it was time for the Justice Society to end and for them to become ordinary civilians again. And without them there, Alan just have up. He put the ring away and focused on running his company, trying to convince himself that the world will get better. He married Molly, and despite never having children, the two were happy together. Convinced that since him and his friend shad saved it so many times and stopped so many villains, the good people will make good choices. He's not going to say life didn't get a little better in some aspects, and for many the changes that came in the decades after the Justice Society disbanded were good and he was proud to see. But so much happened, from Vietnam to everything with the Russians, and Alan watched as everything he did to try and improve Gotham was swept aside so gangs and psychopaths could take over. At first he thought that he could get away with protecting people on his own. Surely the government wouldn't care if an old man started saving a person here and a person there.

He was wrong. They did care.

After they made that perfectly clear, Alan never thought about his past and the lantern again. Until now that is. Now that he sees that picture of Bruce Wayne, clutching a toy tightly to his chest while his butler gently gets him away from the reporters and photographers, all he can think of is what could have been. What if the Justice Society had refused to disband? What if he had continue to fight against the government? What if he had never found the stupid lantern in the first place?

It didn't matter. Sadly the fact remained that he didn't have it in him to be Green Lantern again. He couldn't change the past, he couldn't change what happened to the Wayne family, and he no longer believe he could make Gotham a better place. The truth is that he had failed it, and he doesn't think anyone will be able to save it.

**Tell me what you think and if there are any spelling mistakes or sentences that don't make sense. This is just something that occurred to me when I realised that if Alan Scott was based in Gotham City when he was Green Lantern, that means he had no impact on it or him retiring allowed Gotham to become as bad as it did. Either way him failing to make Gotham better makes him indirectly responsible for the existence of Batman.**


End file.
